Roughly a year (on and off). 3x picking and disarm plus self lore plus living on Teras with Basalt Blat's good supply of easy locks and fire mages good supply of difficult locks provided plenty of materials to work with.

I've mastered it with two characters. I'd guess each took at least a couple of years. But I play a lot of characters, so my playing time is very spread out among them.

--David

"At a moment like this, I can't help but wonder, 'What would Jimmy Buffett do?'"

>My biggest hurdle at the moment is being bored with the picking contests.

took me a bit under a year. but there were generally dozens of boxes sitting outside the Rift needed picked at any given moment. never hard to find the trap I needed.

As for picking contests, I suggest disarm all 5 first, then pick. I rarely lost with that strategy...actually for the first few ranks I think just picking and taking the penalties for the traps got me thru, but at later ranks I had to disarm to win. Use your best pick and lore...speed maters, nothing else.

Took me about a year to master picking, but I took a break from GS in the middle of it so might have been a bit more.

For the picking contests, as long as you don't miss any traps and finish before the trainer, you won't fail the task. I just wrote myself a script to do it for me and used a vaalin pick.

Starchitin

A severed gnomish hand crawls in on its fingertips and makes a rude gesture before quickly decaying and rotting into dust. A gust of wind quickly scatters the dust.

I disarm all five and then pick all five. I rarely miss getting the rep (it happens maybe once every other rank, and only then because my luck is really bad). I just find the task...well...a big yawner.

I have managed to cap (after 17 years) and am hunting the invaders in Ronan's Temple in Solhaven. As there aren't as many Rift Hunters as there used to be, I need to largely hunt up my own boxes these days.

Maynist

I generally disarm three (any three) boxes and then pick all five using the invar lockpick. If I run into any sort of delay I switch to the Vaalin lockpick instead. I usually finish early enough that the bonus points for time offsets any traps I set off.

As to how long to master lock mastery - I've been at it for... 5+ years? and am in my mid 30s - during that time I've mastered alchemy, nearly three weapon types in forging, and archery a couple of times but I'm still working at it and will eventually master it - I generally only pick my own boxes so this certainly slows the process down quite a bit.

-- Robert